Nathan Fielder’s ‘unsettling’ new Elizabeth Holmes documentary trailer leaves viewers reeling

A24 has unveiled a new documentary about Elizabeth Holmes that Nathan Fielder and director Lance Oppenheim have been making in secret for three years, offering unprecedented access to the disgraced Theranos founder.

Titled You Can See Everything, the film’s official description reads: “Thirty-four days before she’s sent to prison, notorious Silicon Valley founder Elizabeth Holmes invites a skeptical film crew to document her every move. What begins as an intimate portrait of an enigmatic felon becomes a mind-bending three-year journey into the abyss.”

Holmes was convicted in January 2022 on four counts of fraud and conspiracy for lying about the capabilities of her biotech company’s blood testing technology and conning investors out of millions of dollars. She was sentenced to more than 11 years in prison.

A teaser trailer for the new documentary, released Monday, shows Nathan For You star Fielder quizzing Holmes while staring deeply into her eyes.

“I don’t have anything to deceive you on,” Holmes tells him. “Of course I’m not deceiving you. I’m engaging with you as a human being. Why would I deceive you? There’s no reason for me to do that.”

“OK. Alright. OK, good chat,” Fielder replies, before adding, “You’re being real right now?”

“I’m always being real,” she says.

For anyone familiar with Fielder’s work, the trailer’s uneasy exchange is likely no surprise.

His projects often blend documentary and reality-TV tropes with pervasive comic irony and are known for blurring the lines between reality and performance. Often, Fielder is seen placing himself and others into elaborate social experiments and letting situations, and those caught up in them, grow increasingly strange and uncomfortable.

In the 2010s comic docuseries Nathan for You, Fielder devised outlandish schemes to ostensibly help struggling businesses, while the bizarre and glaring inappropriateness of each idea remained entirely unacknowledged.

His 2020s series The Rehearsal took ideas from Nathan for You and developed them further, with Fielder helping ordinary people rehearse upcoming difficult conversations or life events by creating extravagant sets and using actors to play out the scenarios. The second season saw Fielder explore ideas around commercial plane crashes, revealing in the season finale that he had secretly trained to become a licensed Boeing 737 pilot over years for the purposes of the show.

You Can See Everything premiered at the Telluride Film Festival in Colorado on Sunday, where it was shrouded in mystery until the screening actually began.

According to the L.A. Times, attendees had to lock their phones in pouches during the screening and were told security personnel with night-vision goggles would watch for anyone using electronic devices.

Fielder was then brought out on stage alongside Oppenheim — the documentarian behind Some Kind of Heaven and the new Robert Pattinson-starring Chris Hansen film Primetime.

“I really am struggling to this day to understand exactly what I experienced in this,” Fielder told the crowd. “I don’t quite know what I went through.”

On Instagram, viewers of the teaser trailer appeared equally unsettled.

“Is Elizabeth Holmes gonna get nominated for Best Actress cause that was more unsettling than Pattinson as Chris Hansen,” wrote one commenter.

“I’ve never been so uncomfortable in my life,” added another.

“This rocked me,” wrote a third.

You Can See Everything will release theatrically in October.

Holmes began serving her 11-year sentence in May 2023 at a federal prison in Texas. Her listed release date at the Federal Bureau of Prisons is currently March 19, 2032.

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